Liquid Snakes: A Novel

“Liquid Snakes” is a strange, disorienting puzzle; a mocking eulogy; a bitter, self-lacerating exercise in what one character calls “vivid ideation”; a long look into a sinkhole of grief. It twists in your hands & in your heart before biting down. — Noah Berlatsky, Los Angeles Times 

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What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this wildly original novel of pollution, poison, & dark pleasure 

In Atlanta, Kenny Bomar is a biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner in denial about his divorce & grieving his stillborn daughter. Chemicals killed their child, leaching from a type of plant the government is hiding in Black neighborhoods. Kenny’s coping mechanisms are likewise chemical & becoming more baroque—from daily injections of lethal snake venom to manufacturing designer drugs. 

As his grief turns corrosive, it taints every person he touches. Black epidemiologists Retta & Ebonee are called to the scene when a mysterious black substance is found to have killed a high school girl. Investigating these “blackouts” sends the women down separate paths of blame & retribution as two seemingly disparate narratives converge in a cinematic conclusion. 

Liquid Snakes is an immersive, white-knuckle ride with the spookiness of speculative fiction & the propulsion of binge-worthy shows like FX’s Atlanta & HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness. Transfiguring a whodunit plot into a labyrinthine reinterpretation of a crime procedural, Stephen Kearse offers an uncanny commentary on an alternative world, poisoned.

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Stephen Kearse is an editor at Spotlight PA, & a contributing writer at The Nation, where he covers music, movies, & books. His criticism & reporting have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ, & Pitchfork. His debut novel, In the Heat of the Light, was published in 2019 by Brain Mill Press.